A nine-year-old girl gave her father an ice cream cone and spoke her final words shortly before a drug-fueled gunman shot her in an apparently unprovoked attack.
“Here, Daddy, I got you an ice cream,” Sarabi Medina told her father, Michael Medina, outside their Chicago apartment in August 2023. Moments later, she was killed.
Sarabi was riding her scooter through Chicago’s Portage Park neighborhood when Michael Goodman, 46, approached her while carrying a gun.
Prosecutors said Michael Medina tried desperately to intervene, but Goodman followed Sarabi into the apartment and shot her in the head.
Medina then tackled Goodman, causing the gun to discharge again. That bullet struck Goodman in the left eye and left him blind on that side, according to Law & Crime.
More than three years after the killing, Goodman pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced Thursday to 40 years in prison without the possibility of parole.
In court, Goodman acknowledged that he had taken multiple doses of ketamine on the day of the shooting—more than the recommended amount.
He said he had bought the drug on the dark web after his antidepressants failed to ease his symptoms.
Nine-year-old Sarabi Medina gave her father an ice cream cone and spoke her final words shortly before a drug-fueled gunman killed her in an unprovoked attack
“Here, Daddy, I got you an ice cream,” Sarabi told her father, Michael Medina
Sarabi was riding her scooter in Portage Park when Michael Goodman, 46, approached her with a gun
In a statement delivered by his attorney, Goodman said he had no memory of shooting Sarabi.
“It was not the largest dose I had ever taken, so I saw no reason to believe the experience would be different from usual,” he said.
Goodman said he began having suicidal thoughts before his memory grew unclear.
“The last part of the vague memory I have is walking through my front door,” he told the court.
Sarabi’s grieving father rejected Goodman’s account and maintained that the gunman deliberately targeted his daughter.
“He talks. I was there that day. We were screaming at that man. That man wouldn’t look at us for nothing. He was focusing on killing my daughter,” Medina told ABC affiliate WLS after the sentencing.
Judge Tyria Walton sentenced Goodman to 40 years in prison, giving him credit for the approximately three years he has already spent behind bars.
When one of Sarabi’s cousins asked for a longer sentence, Walton noted that Goodman would be elderly before he could ever be released.
Goodman said in a statement read by his attorney that he could not remember shooting Sarabi
“He would be 83 years old if he lives to see freedom. Statistically, that does not happen,” the judge said.
Sarabi had been preparing to start fourth grade at Reinberg Elementary School when her life was cut short.
Her death left her family and neighbors devastated. Those who knew her described the young girl as the center of her father’s life.
“She was his world,” Rene Aquino, a friend of Medina, said after the shooting.
“You killed an innocent child, an innocent baby girl—for what reason?”
